Luxe Austin Homes - sellers

Zillow, facing big losses, quits flipping houses and will lay off a quarter of its staff.

Zillow, the real estate website known for estimating house values, said on Tuesday that it would exit the business of rapidly buying and selling houses amid heavy losses and that it planned to let go about nearly 25 percent of its employees.

The announcement was a major strategic retreat and a black eye for Richard Barton, Zillow’s chief executive, who founded the company 16 years ago and has long talked about transitioning Zillow’s popular website into a marketplace. Last year, Mr. Barton predicted Zillow Offers, which made instant offers on homes in a practice known as iBuying, could generate $20 billion a year.

On Tuesday, Zillow, which said it has 8,000 employees, said the division had been the source of huge losses and had made the…

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Lennar Homes’ Plans To Build A Neighborhood Of 3-D Printed Homes In Austin

3D-printed housing has arrived, and is ready for the big time. Homebuilding giant Lennar Homes has committed to building the largest neighborhood of 3D-printed homes yet developed. Breaking ground in early 2022 in the Austin area, the 100-home innovative community is co-designed by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, using ICON's building technology.

The announcement deepens a relationship that began with Lennar’s investment in Austin-based ICON’s recent $207-million financing round and offers a promising path toward delivering affordable, technology-driven homes that meet rising demand. 

There is a shortage of housing in the country, and labor and materials shortages are a frustrating bottleneck for the homebuilders. 3D printing construction has the…

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New Homes Selling At Record Pace In Austin As Shortage Continues

AUSTIN, TX — New homes that hit the real estate market in Austin are selling at a record pace and are often gone in less than three times the amount of time as other new homes across Texas, according to a new report.

New homes listed the city remained on the market an average of only 17 days in September, according to a new monthly report released this week by HomesUSA.com. The new record pace is down drastically from an average of homes spending 83 days on the market at this time in 2020, according to a three-month average of new home sales.

In Texas, the average time on the market for new homes was 54 days, according to the report, which also marked the least amount of time spent listed since the rate was at 93 days last September,…

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Elon Musk announces Tesla headquarters will move to Austin

Tesla will relocate its headquarters to Austin, CEO Elon Musk announced at the company's annual stockholder meeting Oct. 7.

"I'm excited to announce that we are moving our headquarters to Austin, Texas," Musk said at the meeting, which was held at Giga Texas, Tesla's under-development production plant in Southeastern Travis County.

He emphasized that despite headquarters shifting from Fremont, California, to Texas, Tesla's activities in California would continue at a strong pace, with output from both Tesla's Fremont factory and its Reno, Nevada, gigafactory increasing by around 50%. However, he said the company's space for growth was limited in Fremont, and he expected even greater growth in Texas.

"There's a limit to how big you can scale it in the…

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New report shows Austin real estate market "calming"

A recent housing market report by the Austin Board of Realtors shows the real estate market in Central Texas has “calmed” compared to earlier in the year.

Cord Shiflet, incoming president of the ABoR says compared to August 2020, home sales have decreased 4.6 percent.

“While we were seeing 30-40 offers on homes we’re now seeing 5 maybe 10 offers on homes,” says Shiflet.

Rob Gordon, Sales Manager at JB Goodwin Realtors tells us the slight slowdown could be attributed to the typical seasonality of the market, as well as buyer exhaustion from a busy spring.

“There’s a lot of buyers who put in many offers on homes and they never won a home and so they eventually left the market,” says Gordon.

Despite a slower market, prices are at an…

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Austin Leads Texas with the Largest Share of Million Dollar Homes

Austin is known for its thriving real estate market, with prices at an all-time high. It may be surprising to learn that our city ranks in the top 50 cities in the US with the highest share of homes valued at $1 million or more, according to a new study released by Lending Tree. The rankings of the Top 50 cities were determined by the My Lending Tree property value database, which is a collection of real estate data from over 155 million properties in the U.S. The data showed a trend that cities with more start-ups and a larger tech industry made the list, with San Jose, California taking the number one spot with 53.81% of the homes valued over a million dollar. San Jose is also the only city with a median home value exceeding 1 million. San Francisco…

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